Dear Washingtonians:
There is a palpable lack of excitement over the upcoming general
election in November. How are we going to encourage DC votes to come out
to vote, when they don’t see that any of the leading candidates for any
office are going to make any real difference in their lives? The
laughably misnamed Los Angeles Ethics Commission has proposed enrolling
voters in a lottery with cash prizes to get people to participate in
elections (David Zahniser, “Panel Wants LA to Look at Using Prizes to
Boost Voter Turnout,” Los Angeles Times,
http://tinyurl.com/qyc29ea). A
few years ago, DC experimented with paying children to attend schools
and get good grades. Isn’t paying adults to perform their civic duties a
logical next step? (If it isn’t obvious, the sarcasm tag should be added
here.)
#####
Colbert King wrote a very positive column about mayoral candidate
Carol Schwartz, “Carol Schwartz Proves She’s No Empty Suit,”
http://tinyurlcom/k8ts62d, but
the Washington Post showed its bias in the race by the skeptical
title it gave to the article in the print edition, “Carol Schwartz Is
Back in the Race. But Why?” Carol’s handicaps in the mayoral election
are not just the bias of the Post and the overwhelming Democratic
leaning of Washington voters, but also the ignorance of millennial
voters who not only don’t know her long history of positive
contributions to DC politics, but also think that her having a long
history is itself a negative.
#####
In the last issue of themail (August 13), in my piece on “Optimism,”
I wrote: “People fear that their childrens’ lives will not be better
than theirs for a simple reason: it is very likely that they won’t be,
and our political and academic class seems to be satisfied, if not
actually pleased, with that prospect. Economically, for the past
century, Americans aspired to own their own homes, preferably with yards
and with a bedroom for each child. They aspired to own an automobile.
Politicians encouraged them, and worked through laws and tax policies to
help people achieve their aspirations. Now politicians and ‘thought
leaders’ tell people their aspirations and hopes are impractical,
unrealistic, and bad for the earth, and that they should be satisfied
with small apartments not large enough to accommodate families and with
bicycles and buses for transportation. Who wouldn’t be discouraged?”
On August 15, Joel Kotkin seconded and emphasized the same point in
an article about how “The People Designing Your Cities Don’t Care What
You Want; They’re Planning for Hipsters,”
http://tinyurl.com/pz8zsjm.
Kotkin argues that, “Overlooked, or even disdained, is what most
middle-class residents of the metropolis actually want: home ownership,
rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area, good
schools and ‘human scale’ neighborhoods.” Two articles by Michael
Neibauer in the Washington Business Journal about SB Urban
Development’s Blagden Alley proposal illustrate the point further. SB
Urban plans to build a development of 125 microapartments that will be
about 350 sq. ft. each, with no parking. The rent on these apartments is
likely to be in the same range as SB Urban’s Patterson Mansion project
in Dupont Circle — $2,500 to $3,000 a month,
http://tinyurl.com/knv6q4s and
http://tinyurl.com/lb9axrs.
This doesn’t sound to me like the fulfillment of the American dream, or
even the first step on the ladder.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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Ferguson, Missouri — Could It Happen Here?
Dorothy Brizill,
dorothy@dcwatch.com
As the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, has unfolded over the past
two weeks, following the police shooting death of Michael Brown, the
reaction of many in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, who have
closely followed the news accounts of the protest demonstrations and
looting, ranges from disbelief to anger. There are many people who are
fairly dismissive of the situation in Ferguson, a small suburban city
outside of St. Louis, believing that it could never happen here, in the
DC metropolitan area.
While I sincerely hope that no other American city ever experiences a
Ferguson, I am not that confident, largely because it has been
demonstrated that all that is needed is a single incident, like the
shooting of a minority youth, to spark and ignite a tense, volatile
situation in any community. Moreover, many of the same factors that
contributed to the situation in Ferguson are also present in the DC
metropolitan area, including high levels of poverty and unemployment,
bad relations between the police and minority communities, and racial
tensions between blacks and whites (and among Hispanics, blacks, and
whites, as in the 1991 Mt. Pleasant riots). The biggest thing that could
make a difference between Ferguson and the DC metropolitan area is how
authorities in DC would respond to similar circumstances of
demonstrations and looting.
Because Washington, DC, is the nation’s capital, area police
departments are well trained, equipped, and experienced in responding to
large demonstrations. Moreover, since the early 1990’s, community
policing, which is premised on improved communications between the
police and the community, has been the operating model for all police
departments in the metropolitan area
What do you think? Could Ferguson happen here? If it could, what do
we need to do to prevent it, and how do we go about addressing the
underlying problems and issues?
###############
Perhaps a couple of quotes from Wikipedia will clarify the state of
so-called Second Amendment rights “to keep and bear arms.” First,
concerning the Heller decision (2008): “District of Columbia
v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), was a landmark case in which the
Supreme Court of the United States held in a 5-4 decision that the
Second Amendment to the United States Constitution applies to federal
enclaves and protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm for
traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. The
decision did not address the question of whether the Second Amendment
extends beyond federal enclaves to the states, which was addressed later
by McDonald v. Chicago (2010). It was the first Supreme Court
case to decide whether the Second Amendment protects an individual right
to keep and bear arms for self-defense.”
Second, the Chicago decision asserting, for the first time, that the
Second Amendment applied to the states, as well as to the Federal
Government: “McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), is a
landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that
determined whether the Second Amendment applies to the individual
states. The Court held that the right of an individual to ‘keep and bear
arms’ protected by the Second Amendment is incorporated by the Due
Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and applies to the states.”
In short, only since 2010 has the right to “keep and bear arms” been
a Constitutional right of individuals, guaranteed by the Second
Amendment. Our right of democratic self-government goes back lots
further than that.
[In his last posting on Second Amendment rights, Jack took a states
rights position, that the states could nullify portions of the
Constitution with which they disagreed. This posting presents a less
extreme position, that the rights asserted in the Bill of Rights only
apply to the federal government, and not to the states, until and unless
the Supreme Court has ruled on any specific portion of the Bill of
Rights. Opponents of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights have
been fighting on this grounds for a long time. If we accept Jack’s
definition of when a right actually begins to exist, Americans didn’t
have freedom of the speech until 1925, freedom of the press until 1931,
or free exercise of religion until 1940 (see Wikipedia’s article on
“Incorporation of the Bill of Rights”). Obviously, I disagree. Supreme
Court decisions on individual portions of the Bill of Rights mark when
Americans are able to enforce their rights against state and local
authorities who abridge them, not when those rights began to exist. —
Gary Imhoff]
###############
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